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In the Iowa Schoolyard: You’re a Liberal! Am Not! Are Too!

DES MOINES — You know the Republican presidential candidates are beginning to get a little desperate when they start calling each other liberals.

Not one in the current pack even remotely qualifies for that label, but in the final hours before the Iowa caucus tomorrow night, several are using it as the ultimate insult, playing to an audience that wants to see its candidates as anti-government as possible.

First Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC released an ad darkly hinting at a “liberal Republican” conspiracy to knock him out of the race with negative campaigning. Since most of the anti-Gingrich ads were produced by Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, the reference was clear.

Then two other candidates started training fire on Rick Santorum, the very socially conservative former senator from Pennsylvania who has caught fire with that segment of the Iowa electorate in the last few days. As the last remaining candidate to assume the highly transient mantle of the official anti-Romney, Mr. Santorum had to be quickly defined by his opponents. Both Ron Paul and Rick Perry went liberal-nuclear, fast.

Mr. Paul called him “very liberal” for spending too much money while in Congress. “He wasn’t leading the charge to slash the budgets and vote against big government,” Mr. Paul said on CNN. Of course, compared to Mr. Paul – who wants to abolish a third of the government, along with the Federal Reserve and any government function not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution – most of the Republican party is a bunch of bleeding hearts.

“Seventy-seven percent of the American people are opposed to foreign aid and Rick Santorum has voted for it every time it’s come down,” Senator Paul said, standing next to his father in Des Moines this morning. Presumably, that makes anyone who has ever supported aid to Israel, to use just one example, suspiciously liberal.

This afternoon, Mr. Perry released a web ad accusing Mr. Santorum of being just another big-spending Washington insider. Against a backdrop of pigs in a sty, the ad calls Mr. Santorum “a porker’s best friend” for supporting earmarks for Pennsylvania while he was in the Senate.

This attack, of course, is an evergreen one that can be used against virtually anyone who has served in Congress and tried to influence spending on behalf of their constituents. The alternative, as lawmakers are quickly learning since they banned earmarks last year, is either to give more spending decisions to the executive branch, or to continue with earmarks under a disguise.

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Certainly Texas – with its multiplicity of army bases, NASA facilities, and other federal grants – would be only a fraction of itself without earmarks, and there was nothing particularly liberal about their allocation in previous decades. In fact, as the Austin American-Statesman points out, Mr. Perry’s administration has sought millions of dollars in earmarks for his state, even as he has sought to humiliate other Republican opponents for doing precisely the same thing.